[ltp] T60 SATA hard drive compatibility?

[Dmitry E. Mikhailov]

On Fri, 2013-01-04 at 15:01 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> On Friday, January 04, 2013 06:01:56 AM Nate Bargmann wrote:
> 
> > A venerable T60 that I had been using seems to have died completely
> > recently.  I may have zapped it with static as the screen went blank
> > when I picked it up off the desk a few weeks ago and it has not
> > restarted since.  A few months ago I had bought a new 250 GB drive for
> > it and now that drive is surplus unless I find a compatible model.
> > 
> > As I'm hunting for a replacement laptop I may as well update to
> > something with more current performance.  What newer Thinkpad models use
> > a compatible hard disk that I could slip mine into?  The eBay auction
> > ad listed a few newer models.  Are there differences between the SATA
> > connectors on the drives that I need to look out for?
> 
> Does the T60 take SATA drives?
T61 certainly does. Writing the message on it. No doubt T60 also does.

The SATA connector and drives are all compatible. SATA generations are
backwards compatible also so generally there's no problem to connect any
SATA drive to any SATA port. BUT when we're talking about Lenovo/IBM
laptops...

Lenovo requires that the drive has specific firmware that supports
IDLE_IMMEDIATE command that unloads the disk heads off the surface. It's
needed for the HDAPS subsystem. So you have three options:
1) The disk has the correct firmware for the newer Thinkpad -> it works
flawlessly.
2) The disk has no correct firmware -> there's an "incompatible disk"
message on bootup and you have to press some key (or wait some seconds)
to continue. And you do not have HDAPS.
3) The disk has no correct firmware but you've loaded a patched BIOS for
that Thinkpad -> You do not have HDAPS.

If you're on budget then look for T400/T500 - they seem to have patched
BIOS and they're on DDR3 - you can have 16GB RAM if you really want (or
get 8GB cheap).

-- 
Best regards,
        Dmitry Mikhailov